By Nermeen Nabil Khear 
Isn’t it absolutely insane that we exist in a reality where the leader of the free world, his wife, the president of Argentina, and the president of the Central African Republic all scammed their own people with meme coin rug pulls?
This market cycle has been the most bizarre of them all, as we saw these celebrity-backed meme coins take center stage on the Solana blockchain, which remains an incompetent competitor for Ethereum.
After the horrifying events of last weekend with Argentina’s president Javier Milei, who casually rug-pulled investors with a meme coin (LIBRA) and then publicly blamed them in a very condescending interview, some in the community are wondering if this is the end of meme coin era.
Though interestingly enough, the broader crypto market seems largely unaffected by the fact that $4.6 billion of liquidity was lost in less than ten hours. Bitcoin only lost around 1%, which is truly shocking because the OG crypto has been particularly sensitive this cycle.
The best thing about this whole scams on SOL implosion that is going on right now is that the scams usually implode while the market implodes
But BTC is still trading at around $100k
The scams were washed out without taking the market down entirely, that’s very very rare
— DonAlt (@CryptoDonAlt) February 17, 2025
The entire LIBRA-Javier debacle has exposed some things about the industry that the author of this article has long suspected, which is that everything is not as it seems, and decentralization is a myth for the majority of crypto.
First, those influencers and those KOLs, with their weird Telegram and WhatsApp group chats, have a full-blown insider trading ring that colludes with some of the largest crypto exchanges in the world to snipe supplies of these shitcoins and squeeze as much money as they can from retail investors.
Hayden Davis, the dude who created Javier’s meme coin along with Donald Trump’s TRUMP and MELANIA, basically told the world that presidents were flying him out to have high-end dinners with influential people, as Cryptopolitan reported yesterday.
Kelsier Ventures is an actual crime family. Along with Hayden Davis the CEO, you have his dad Tom Davis as Chairman, and brother Gideon Davis as COO. Gideon just wiped his X bio and deleted his Instagram. Other co-founders are doing the same thing. It’s unravelling fast for them. pic.twitter.com/KmZPOWBspB
— Beanie (@beaniemaxi) February 16, 2025
The guy was at Mar-a-Lago one month and Buenos Aires the next, allegedly mapping out rug pulls. Hayden actually name-dropped Jupiter and Meteora with their co-founder Ben Chow in his interview with Dave Portnoy, saying they were in on the launch of LIBRA for at least a month and that they plotted with Javier Milei to scam people. Just take a look at the screenshot below and check out what Hayden is saying.
Right now, Hayden (who almost certainly has criminal charges in his future) is holding $100 million in LIBRA profits hostage until Javier and his team agree to tell everyone the truth, among other things he wouldn’t say. How ridiculous is that?
Folks on Twitter are saying this timeline is worse than when FTX collapsed, which was pretty bad.
Solana’s SOL is being dragged through hell as its price went from above $200 all the way to $160, hitting almost everyone since it’s nearly impossible to be a crypto trader without holding SOL. So when SOL tumbles, it has far-reaching effects.
Just checked Solana price.
Do not recommend.
— Bold (@boldleonidas) February 18, 2025
Another person that was implicated is of course President Donald Trump, whose TRUMP meme coin was also created by Hayden. And then Coinbase and its founder Brian Armstrong, and oddly enough, even Strategy’s Michael Saylor was subtly mentioned, though for reasons of partiality, this author finds that a bit hard to believe.
What if they were all like Vitalik?
As aforementioned, there’s absolutely no surprise from the author here. But of course not everyone in the industry is a greedy sociopath only interested in making millions quickly and then lying that it happened because of a hack.
Most people on crypto Twitter are saying they’ve lost hope in the market. One user said, “This hayden kid was single handedly the architect of the death spiral of memecoins while proclaiming memes to be zero sum and rigged. Insane times.”
Another said, “Hayden is worse than SBF. At least SBF was one of us. He made money when we made money. Misappropriated funds went back into crypto. SBF made good bets. His intention wasn’t to rape us. Just got caught by bad timing. Nobody lost. Hayden only extracts. He’s the worst supervillian.”
This one guy said, “Is this space really that green that they’re pretending to be shocked that every big project has supply control? I have no horse in this race, Hayden can go to jail, but at the end of the day, it’s either snipe or be sniped. Either you control your supply or randoms do. What’s more ideal? Random faceless snipers dictating a project or the actual team? This is why DeFi is cooked. There is no answer. Those are the 2 options in today’s casino.”
And they’re all right, that is our reality. But for this author, one person gives a reason to hope. And that person is Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin. While scrolling through all these comments on X, I found myself wondering: what would the crypto space look like if every influential person in it was like Vitalik?
There would be no influencer shilling, no political meme coins, and no billion-dollar rug pulls. No centralized exchanges secretly gambling with customer funds and organizing insider trading rings with oddly-powerful incels.
Just a world of developers, cryptographers, and open-source maxis who care more about decentralization than profit. Vitalik doesn’t cut deals behind closed doors, and he doesn’t pump his own token.
In fact, he hardly talks directly about it, and whenever he does, he almost always focuses on the Ethereum network and not ETH. A month after celebrity meme coins properly went viral, around January 2024, Vitalik said, “This cycle’s celebrity experimentation is disappointing. If these projects lead to valuable outcomes like healthcare or open-source software, I could respect them. But too often, they exploit celebrity names without delivering real value.”
I get the ETH criticism, but at this point, Vitalik and Ethereum are among the few morally decent forces left in crypto.
— YUYU。昱 (@cyber_yuyu) February 16, 2025
That’s exactly what happened with LIBRA, the Argentine president’s meme coin disaster. Javier Milei hyped the token on X minutes after it launched. The price surged past $4, then collapsed to under 50 cents. Investors lost millions, and it is now the largest rug pull in crypto history.
Vitalik saw it coming. When Trump launched his coins, the Ether creator said, “Political meme coins are a perfect bribery vehicle. They risk distorting democracy and only create short-term excitement.” But unfortunately, the market rewards hype over substance, and that’s why politicians, influencers, and ex-CEOs keep launching tokens with zero utility.
“Too many memecoins create dissatisfaction within their communities and detract from serious projects,” Vitalik has said before.
If everyone followed Vitalik’s mindset, VC-backed cash grabs would disappear, and money would flow into research, development, and security. Instead of launching the next hype-driven layer-1, builders would be focused on solving real problems.
Right now, crypto rewards short-term speculation. If Vitalik was the standard, it would reward long-term innovation. Vitalik has said: “There are hundreds of billions of dollars of capital flowing around, but public goods that are key to that capital’s ongoing survival are receiving only tens of millions of dollars per year of funding.”
The crypto industry doesn’t agree on much, but even the harshest Ethereum critics admit Vitalik is the only one who has never done anything shady.
Deployers routinely send him millions of their meme coins, and Vitalik always immediately liquidates and donates to animal shelters and war-torn regions like Ukraine and Gaza.
In fact, this guy has set his own moral standards so high that even though he’s never sold his Ether holdings (which are in the hundreds of millions of dollars), the community still lashes out at him for the Ethereum Foundation selling a few ETH annually for funding.
Vitalik isn’t buying politicians or lobbying to make Ethereum the government’s favorite chain, and he’s never actually partnered with any exchange of projects before. He’s never been about quick wins or short-term profits.
If the whole industry followed Vitalik’s playbook, the space would be brutally honest, slow-moving, and completely transparent.
There wouldn’t be “Ethereum killers” rushing to launch without a working product. There wouldn’t be centralized exchanges secretly insolvent while pretending to be safe. There wouldn’t be Ponzi schemes disguised as “yield opportunities.”
If only the industry was full of Vitaliks. If only…
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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